Greg Olsen spent most of the FOX broadcast defending Malik Nabers, and Nabers still tagged him in an Instagram post about the coverage.
Nabers finished with five catches for 43 yards on eight targets in a 19-11 Giants win over the Eagles, and he dropped a fade in the end zone that would have been a touchdown. That is the context for everything the booth said about him.
The body language line came from Joe Davis, the play-by-play voice. Davis said Nabers’s body language “has been terrible today”, and he later criticized him for still looking upset after a teammate scored the go-ahead touchdown. Olsen, the color analyst, went the other way. Citing offensive coordinator Matt Nagy, he said great receivers demand the ball, and right after the drop he said “you want to demand the ball.” He said it about a player who had just dropped a touchdown, and that is a defense.
Nabers’s reply went to the wrong address. He posted on Instagram, tagged Olsen, and said that if you don’t like the way he plays, keep the camera off him. He also objected to being called a “bad teammate.”
That phrase is where the story gets slippery. Awful Announcing reviewed the broadcast and found no such phrase. It appears to have started in a Heavy.com story, and the New York Post revised its own story to remove the attribution.
https://x.com/gregolsen88/status/2119763567431868786
Give Nabers the counterargument, because it is a real one. Davis did say the body language was terrible, on air, and a player is allowed to object to a play-by-play man grading his face.
But the target matters. Davis was the man he could have answered, and Olsen was the one voice on the call arguing his side. I think the post cost him the cleanest case he had, because it put Olsen in the position of publicly denying words he says were never said and gave the whole thing a second round of coverage.
A request for the camera to look away works only if nobody is pointing it at you. Posting it for every follower to see is the most reliable way to keep it there.
The next time FOX shows that dropped fade, the replay will come with Nabers’s post attached.
